>>Again, I'm not so sure that they would
just ignore rights altogether.>They'd surely reject the idea of rights
as an inviolable moral code, but as>to whether they would respect them
anyway? That's another issue entirely.>

"respect them anyway?" Hmmm.... Having
rejected the notion of rights (by which
we might mean the "just and proper" --
or at least customary -- claims or
entitlements that people invent to
protect their property or activities),
it seems to this brain (the one typing
this) that in reality "rights" means
whatever an entity can get away with.
Correlating to the concept of "Manifest
Destiny" which gave Europeans the
"right" to take possession of an already
inhabited continent, one might foresee
that an even craftier machine
intelligence might come up with some
brilliant reasoning to justify
exterminating a major portion of the
human population who present an
inconvenience by their existence. No
doubt a few humans (not to mention the
UnGreat Satan Saddam Hussein) have
entertained the same kind of
justification for exterminating masses
of humans. But mass murderers of the
human kind haven't yet had enough
intelligence to figure out how to do it.

Bottom line: We can find plenty of
reason to fear malevolent
super-intelligence, but malevolent
ordinary intelligence may wipe us out
first.